| What is an E-marketplace anyway? |
E-marketplace is a business to business web based venue, where
buyers and sellers meet online, generate business leads and
conduct business transactions. The e-marketplace features are
tailored in a manner so that a large numbers of buyers and
suppliers can be serviced as a community. A participant of an
E-marketplace can be a buyer, a seller or both. Unlike an
E-distribution portal which is oriented to assist suppliers
selling their products or an E-procurement system which is
focused on buyers solely, an E-marketplace is a platform which
caters buyers and sellers equally. As a participant of an
E-marketplace you are able to explore buying and selling
opportunities, make sales offers and buy products and services,
add products and services to aggregated e-catalog and use
numerous other value added features.
E-marketplaces are tremendously beneficial to all businesses
that decide to participate in them. However, the potential
benefits that a company can accrue from an E-marketplace are
directly proportional to the factor — how heavily the company
uses the offered features of that E-marketplace. Naturally,
a company that makes e-marketplace as its primary sales channel
and integrates its sales resources to supply chain solutions of
the E-marketplace avail more in sales and administrative
overhead cost savings, reduced paper work, better customer
service, reduced product distribution costs and online sales
growth than a seasonal user of the e-marketplace.
A committed participant of an E-marketplace can benefit from
and improve two primary factors of company productivity:
Revenue Growth and Cost Savings.
1. Revenue Growth
Expand Customer Base:
A seller, once registered with an E-marketplace, gets immediate
access to a large community of prospective buyers of his products
or services.
Revenue Increase from Existing Clients:
Existing clients get faster and easier access to product
information, quicker response to their requests, get better
customer support and buy products online.
Revenue Increase from Value Added Services:
Once an E-marketplace is set as primary sales channel, freed
resources can be used to create more value added services for
clients. Some of the services that the E-marketplace offers
also can be utilized to generate more value.
2. Cost Savings
Order Processing Cost:
The supply chain solutions of E-marketplace allow sellers to
reduce order processing cost significantly. Studies show that
cost of processing a purchase order can be reduced from US$ 70
down to US$ 6 only.
Sales and support costs:
By automating sales and customer support processes companies
can reduce over head costs over 25-30% easily.
Inventory keeping costs:
Clearer visibility and forecasting ability allow companies
considerably reduce inventory keeping costs.
Most executives agree that primary reason why they feel that
the companies should participate in E-marketplace is its
ability to streamline supply chain mechanism. Many inherent
inefficiencies of supply chain process can be eliminated thanks
to integrated to e-marketplaces supply chain solutions.
What sellers have to do in order to participate in E-marketplaces
and reap numerous benefits that it can provide?
As most of the administrative and operational tasks are done
automatically by the e-marketplaces, participation in them is
not a difficult process.
These are the basic steps that a seller must take to participate
in an E-marketplace:
Register:
Registration might be an easy job of filling up a form. It is
much better to take some initial preparations before doing this.
Choose a good login name:
your login can be used by the E-marketplace to give you subdomain
name, i.e. login.e-marketplace_name.com.
Profile:
A well-written profile increases company image.
Logo:
your logo helps you brand your company.
Add your products or services to E-catalog:
Most E-marketplaces furnish with easy to use forms or wizards
for sellers to add their products to E-catalog. As the product
and service classification used in the E-catalogs often is an
industry standard, it is important to spend some times to find
the perfect subcategories for your products or services. If you
have any doubt contact the customer support of the E-marketplace.
Fill up as many given fields are there for a product as you can.
The more information buyer gets right away the faster his buying
decision would be.
Create offers:
Most sophisticated E-marketplaces have various sales platforms
apart from the E-catalog inclusion. Make general sales offers,
time sensitive offers (hot offers – with offer expiry dates)
and auction offers of your products and services. Determine the
terms and methods of price, payment and shipment.
Decide how you will handle portions of the supply chain that
you have to do offline.
Although, most of the supply chain process can be done online,
not all e-marketplace offer a complete end to end solution. You
also have to figure out what part of your back office can be
integrated to the E-marketplace.
About the author
Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO
of Rusbiz.com. He has Ph. D. degree in Information Technology.
Dr. Kabir has over 12 years of experience in International Trade
and has worked as an advisor to several government projects.
You can contact him at mailto:nowshade@rusbiz.com,
http://www.rusbiz.com
|
Back to Articles Index
|
|
 |
|
